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Dec 9, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
“Meritocracy” is one of the great taken-for-granteds of our times. When the Productivity Commission looked at social mobility rates recently it reported in tones of relief and pleasure that we’re doing okay, pausing not for a moment to wonder whether social mobility and the social set-up it serves might have a downside.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
johnmenadue.com | Dean Ashenden
Lyndsay Connors (Pearls and Irritations, 14 November 2024) takes issue with my argument that the Commonwealth should get out or be pushed out of schooling. The argument for a Commonwealth exit is this:– By just about every indicator Australian schooling has been on the slide for at least 20 years, despite the Rudd/Gillard governments’ boast that a beefed up Commonwealth-led ‘national approach’ would put Australia among the OECD’s top five ‘performers’ by 2025.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
The standoff between the federal government and the states is nominally a part of negotiations over a new National School Reform Agreement. In reality, these are not negotiations, nor are they national, and nor are they about reform. The NSRAs were devised by deputy prime minister Julia Gillard in those heady days when a new Labor government had taken office in Canberra and all but one of the states were in the party’s hands as well.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
Galloping economic inequality has provoked much fretting about social mobility, and particularly about entry into the ranks of “the privileged,” along with some soul-searching on whether mobility is such a good idea after all. In the United States political philosopher Michael Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit) concludes that social mobility is a mixed blessing at best.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
If you were to drive from Barcaldine to Longreach to Winton, as I did recently, you would return fearing that the omnishambles of the Voice referendum will be joined in due course by the train wreck of truth telling. Strung out over 200 kilometres in the middle of Queensland, the three towns are all history hotspots, and all three trade on the fact.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
If you were to drive from Barcaldine to Longreach to Winton, as I did recently, you would return fearing that the omnishambles of the Voice referendum will be joined in due course by the train wreck of truth telling. Strung out over 200 kilometres in the middle of Queensland, the three towns are all history hotspots, and all three trade on the fact.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
At a time when a special series on schools means for the Age “celebrating schools that achieve outstanding improvement in their VCE results over a decade”; when think tanks assume that to think about schooling is to pick a bite-sized “problem” or “issue” and offer a fix; when an agency with a $50 million grant from government offers the sovereign remedy of filling teachers’ heads with “gold standard” research so that their “practice” will be “evidence-based” — at such a time to see...
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Dean Ashenden
“Dear Miss,” begins Letter to a Teacher. “You won’t remember me or my name. [But] I have often had thoughts about you and about that institution which you call ‘school’ and about the boys that you fail. “You fail us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us.”The Letter was addressed to every teacher, every school, the system. The “us” (and the “I”) were eight boys in their early teens, sons of Italian peasant families from Barbiana, a hamlet in the backblocks north of Florence.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Clive Hamilton |Myra Hamilton |Dean Ashenden
Elite wannabes could do worse than study up on Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton’s The Privileged Few, a documentation of the “machinery of privilege” as complete, orderly and detailed as a user manual: the four types of capital, the three elements of privilege, the five techniques of philanthropy, three ways to launder a reputation, eight ways to hide or justify privilege.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
johnmenadue.com | Dean Ashenden
There is no government or agency or combination of them capable of conceiving and driving the kind and scale of change Australian schooling now requires. The ‘national approach’ installed by the Rudd and Gillard governments fifteen years ago has not worked and cannot. Its sponsor, the Commonwealth, should move or be moved to the margins or get out of schooling altogether.
